


To Killers

by pendaly



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Book: Dragon Age - Asunder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 17:00:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13275900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendaly/pseuds/pendaly
Summary: Cole and Leliana have met before, although she doesn't remember it. A short conversation between two people who may have more in common than they thought.





	To Killers

**Author's Note:**

> This is just me starting to dip my toes into the pool of Dragon Age fic-writing. After reading DA Asunder I couldn't get the thought of Cole and Leliana talking during inquisition, not necessarily about what happened in Asunder, but about things barely tangentially related to those events.

It's always startling when she sees Cole again. A moment passes where she's alarmed that someone has managed to sneak up on her, then a moment of inability to recognize her company, finally followed by a slow recollection of all the times she can recall seeing him.

This time is no different and she lowers the dagger from where it’s clashed against his own, held nonchalantly a few inches from his face.

“How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me?”

“I didn't.”

He goes that eerie quiet he sometimes does when she knows he’s pawing through her thoughts and she lifts an eyebrow at him, sliding her dagger back into its sheath and he does the same, creeping around the table in that hunched way he moves like he’s trying not to be seen despite his ability to simply vanish.

“You don't have to be sorry for what you do,” He says, climbing into a seat across from her, “Having enemies doesn't make you a bad person.”

Leliana returns her attention to the desk she’d been working at, keeping a careful eye on him from across the table, “It would be polite if you kept out of my head, Cole.”

He’s so quiet and he slips away so easily when she doesn't have her eyes on him and that worries her, but she's long since given up keeping tabs on him when her scouts never knew what to look for and she rarely remembered what she intended to task them with. For moments there are silence and Leliana begins to doubt whether she’ll see the boy again when she looks up before he breaks the silence.

“What are you?”

She looks up at him, “A funny question from someone who can't decide if he's a man or a spirit.”

“Is it funny?” He asks and seems to think about it before letting out a small laugh as if to test whether he believes it funny enough to laugh at or not. A scowl passes over his features and he settles back into himself, “That's not the same though. They call you Sister, and Spymaster, and Left Hand, and all sorts of things and I don't know what you are.”

“Are you asking me what my position is?”

“No.” 

Again he was silent before speaking up.

“Old Woman called you Sister Leliana. I thought you were a priest, but you didn’t seem like a priest. Mottled and too familiar with the grime and sneaking through sewers. She knows too much about picking pockets and stamping mud from her boots to be clean and pure like the Clever Holy Woman, but she has her stains too as light as she is. The sewers choke with stench and I’ll save them, saving them is the only justification for all the blood on my hands. A favor for a friend and a triumph for the world, it has to be enough to wipe away the Blood.”

Leliana’s face softens even as he shamelessly paws through her thoughts, “It still intrigues me that I can never remember you were there.”

“I don’t want you to.”

Silence.

“Are you thinking about Rhys?”

Cole averts his eyes and for as well as he can read others, the boy can't seem to hold a poker face. She may not remember Cole’s involvement at the White Spire, but it’s simple to infer that he was involved for how he asks whether Leliana knows where his friends are, how he talks to her from time to time about events at the White Spire that he would only know through being there. She’d once thought he simply retrieved the information from her, but there were things he knew that she didn’t.

“I have people out searching for him,” She assured him.

“And Evangeline.”

She nods, “And Evangeline.”

“Good,” He nods in return, mimicking her movement.

Again silence reigns and Leliana nearly begins to think that he’s vanished again, though the silence in Cole’s presence never feels forced or uncomfortable. When he breaks it again Leliana looks up from her work to see his face contorted in what might be sadness, or perhaps guilt.

“I want-” He begins, “I haven't seen him since he realized what I am. Since I left him dark and hurting. I don't want him to hate me.”

This is one way Leliana knows she can't help, “I can't say what will happen. He may hate you, he may be overjoyed to see you again.”

“Inquisitor is so like him. Wants to help the lost, but it's at so hard when he's already lost too. Don't kill them, why would you murder them? But they wanted it, needed it. The only freedom from fear and pain choking, aching, screaming. Is it not better like this? He says to me that we don’t know what will happen, but they’re scared of that too, so I let them go and now I'm a killer.”

“That is one thing we have in common.”

Cole looks up at her with those sunken eyes that manage to peek so gently into her soul and pull it to the surface from where it laid so carefully buried and guarded, “So much blood, can’t wash it all away so why not continue to coat my hands in it? Horrible and necessary and can I even stop it?”

Leliana raises a hand as if to raise a glass and nods her head to Cole as his words rip the feelings from her stomach and place them out on the table for both of them to see.

“To killers.”

“To killers,” he echoes and when Leliana blinks he's already gone, the memory fading, slipping like the last wisps of a forgotten dream through her fingers.


End file.
